How To Be 100% Productive While Working Remotely
Remote work is surely one of the best things that happened to the work industry recently. It allows people to work from anywhere they want without the obligation to go to the office. In fact, it was the biggest benefit people didn’t know they needed.
Remote work made it possible to combine personal life with work without crossing the line. People could now work from home, spend lunchtime with family, play with pets mid-work and enjoy physical freedom.
Despite this massive advantage, remote work also creates favorable conditions for unproductivity.
If working from home, you must be careful not to give in to temptations like playing video games, watching Netflix, lying on the couch, and more. If living with family and pets, they can be distracting as well.
However, it is possible to be highly productive even when working remotely.
Here’s how.
- Create a comfortable working environment
To be highly productive at remote work, you need to be in a comfortable and inspiring working environment. However, an average house room is barely designed for work. That’s why we have to take care of that.
If you don’t have one already, get a desk and a comfortable chair. These will take care of your posture, as you are going to be sitting most of the day. If your company does not provide the equipment, try to get hold of a high-quality monitor, so as not to hurt your eyes.
It will be ideal if you place your working desk next to or close to the window or natural light.
Don’t forget to keep water next to you and some snacks in your drawer.
- Schedule your day
Working remotely does not mean being free from a schedule. On the contrary, a schedule is a must if you want to be productive.
Sometimes working from home means waking up later than you usually would. However, when you have a schedule and moreover when it turns into a habit, you start work at a fixed time, have lunch and breaks at a fixed time and devote reasonable time to each.
It is ok to deviate from your schedule sometimes, but having a sense of time will most likely not let you get carried away and end up procrastinating.
- Use productivity tools
There are a number of tools meant to simplify and make remote work productive. These are planning, organizing, and time management tools with a variety of functionalities.
WebWork is a perfect example of a digital tool designed for remote work management. It helps track your time spent on work and improves your time management skills as a result. It also has a Task Management system where you can organize your tasks so that the whole team has an idea of a project’s state. With communication tools, such as Team Chat and Video Calls, your team will stay connected no matter where you all work from in the world.
And finally, productivity tracking shows you your productivity practices at work. It is measured by analyzing your app and website usage and device activity.
WebWork is also a time tracker with screenshots and uses 4 modes to make remote work transparent to managers. If privacy is an issue, it has a blurred mode that keeps the details private but still manages to give an idea of the work process.
- Remove distractions
Probably the biggest obstacles to productivity in remote work are distractions. As mentioned above, these can be family members, pets, noise, the comfort of your bed, the list goes on.
Now that you have a home office, look around you and think what might be a potential distraction. If you are struggling to stay concentrated cause you keep picking up your phone, your phone is most likely a distraction. Ideally, you would put it in another room, but at least you can turn off the notifications.
If your video game console is in near proximity and you tend to play it a little too much during work hours, you might consider removing it as well.
What refers to family members and pets, talk to them and tell them not to distract you from work. Explain to them that working from home is no less work.
Summing it up
Remote work is a great way to make work less an obligation and more a way of living. Despite the potential risks and distractions, it is possible to make remote work 100% productive, especially considering the big advantage it offers.
The tips mentioned in this article should be enough to let you enjoy remote work and become 100% productive.
Author bio
Liana Papyan is a content writer and an English language enthusiast. Her current writing niches are remote work, productivity, time tracking, and the like. Liana also writes marketing copy and is trying to be a UX writer at the same time. The only thing she likes more than writing is reading.
